TSB has named Debbie Crosbie as the chief exec to clear up its tech mess and persuade customers they can still trust the meltdown bank.
Crosbie has spent two decades at CYBG – owner of Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks – and is currently chief operating officer for those two organisations.
man angry while looking at his mobile …

Here's a suggestion...

Keep local branches open and have site-specific databases for all customers within 25 miles which communicate with the Head Office DB but can run in local-only mode when the link goes down.

This would have the benefits of customers being able to get their money when the comms go down again, and would increase local employment because they would need to re-employ all those counter staff they have laid off recently.

Re: Here's a suggestion...

That would be grand.... i could blow up the local telephone exchange then withdraw all my money as cash from the now isolated bank then have a quick scoot 25 miles down the road and withdraw it again before the comms come back up. Now if only i had a million quid i could withdraw in cash....

Funny you should say that...

I had a summer job in the late 90s, just after the two banks had merged.

Whilst 'officially merged' they hadn't actually joined up their IT at this point. So you could happily stroll into my TSB branch and ask to withdraw many thousands from your Lloyds account (I forget the amount, but might have been 5k, when we would ask them to hold on whilst we phoned to check they actually had the money).

You could then happily spend your day visiting other branches and doing the same - with only the over-night clearing possibly picking up on it..(within a few working days)

Re: There is a very good reason

In order to rid themselves of all these custom applications and scripts all the banks (large, small and challenger) are adopting a cloud strategy running off the shelf packages in both private and public cloud.

The same public clouds.

Out of the frying pan into the boiling flammable cloud ready for the slightest spark to ignite it!

In it for the money

It doesn't matter who they appoint, they all have the same plan: Take a position - usually on an incredibly high salary - and try and stay as long as possible. When the going gets tough, leave, having amassed a small fortune.

If the people who were in charge of these things were given a basic salary and given a bonus if - and only if - they avoided or sorted out cock ups, you'd probably find nobody willing to do it!

They're all in it for the money and essentially if it all goes tits up their attitude is - meh, I'll be on an island in the sun whilst someone else repeats the process.

Re: In it for the money

Lose money if any updates fail? Then no updates. No new products, no new features, no new customers.

Yeah, I guess that's true. But there is still a fundamental problem, which is being repeated time and time again, where people take positions with no intention of staying to sort out problems. The salaries that go with these positions (plus any other bonuses/options) usually mean nobody would have to stay longer than a few years to walk away with a very healthy amount of money. That is a huge issue which needs addressing but there is no simple solution to it.

"I've heard so much about the team"

Re: "I've heard so much about the team"

Debbie: "I've heard so much about the team"...

the unwritten rest of the spiel: "and am stunned that we still employ a costly onshore team, so I am starting crash program to off-shore this to both generate an immediate bonus for myself AND to create a firebreak so that I can conveniently blame any future failures on our "Service Partners", thus insulating myself from future censure....... now where's my effin bonus???"

"Working Street" ?

tough call

So, she has to save at least £360m to get back to square one pre-crisis. In fact probably more due to lost customers. And they've barely sorted out the move from one bespoke system to another. Local team probably really pissed off and now expected to 'perform' even better while dealing with offshore teams that don't really give a shit.

I'd be giving that chalice a fecking good scrub if I was her...and be expecting the money up front.

She sounds like

Think I know what I'd rather have....

Modern banking platform, running a micro-service architecture on a private cloud on commodity hardware, likely in others' high availability data centre in an active-active configuration, and employing industry standard middle-ware that its easy to hire staff to operate OR

The traditional mode o banking IT of shelling out every 10 years for the next generation of IBM mainframe because it can run running creaking code, quite possibly dating from the 60's, and in COBOL; staffing this operation is a significant risk in its own right and change takes literally years (Ask RBS about this).

I reckon TSB is in a much better place long-term than the other major banking groups who are working out who how on earth they're getting off their legacy systems. The appetite for a radical re-platforming is much reduced.

Much talk of building their own challenger banks from scratch (or most likely, with more expensive IBM middleware) and migrating customers slowly. Several of these start-up incubators are in the Old Street area in London - strangely enough just down the road from Monzo :)

I understand that when Lloyds and TSB merged, they merged onto TSB's IT platform. Which Lloyds is now left with ;)

Re: Think I know what I'd rather have....

Yes the underlying stuff will be running on a private cloud on commodity hardware, but running on top of that will be a pile of steaming latest/greatest in-house apps & microservices developed in the latest/greatest Agile & DevOps fashion.

This will be great for a couple of years, until the original devs leave. Then it's going to be exactly the same problems, with nobody now having a clue how (or if) all of these things interface - again. Only now it will originally have been implemented in a more efficient fashion.